Vieques: On the Path of Recovery

Arriving in Vieques, the small Puerto Rican island located eight miles off the mainland, by ferry from Fajardo in late January, the island seemed well on its way to recovery.

Lost Newburgh: The Tragedy of Urban Renewal

In the 1960s and early 1970s, urban renewal devastated Kingston, Poughkeepsie and other Hudson Valley cities, but Newburgh likely suffered the most, given the scale of destruction and the nature of what was lost. Approximately 1,300 buildings were demolished, annihilating the downtown commercial district, which dated back to the 1820s. Nine streets were plowed under. The city’s African American community was uprooted, with thousands of businesses and residents displaced.

Black Tourism in Era of Jim Crow

Peg Leg Bates, the one-legged vaudevillian and dancer born in 1907 to a South Carolina sharecropper, performed all over the country. But when the show was over, Bates—despite the fact he was nationally famous–had to struggle to find accommodations, since African Americans were barred from booking rooms in white-owned hotels or eating meals in white-owned restaurants. Having experienced personally the hassles blacks had to endure when traveling, he opened the Peg Leg Bates Country Club in Kerhonksen in 1951, which was one of the first resorts for blacks in the Catskills.

It’s All on the Bag: Reher Center’s Sunday List

Hymie Reher titled it his “Sunday List”— the orders for his rolls consisting of dozens of names jotted down on a folded brown paper bag. The scribbled-upon piece of paper (which might have been written by Hymie’s brother or one of his four sisters) evokes the rush of getting out the orders mingled with the pre-dawn fragrance of rolls baking in the oven: some names are followed by numbers, some are crossed out or circled. It’s the kind of detritus your mother would have thrown out, but fortunately, Geoffrey Miller is not your mother.

Community Spotlight: Newburgh

Anyone who was in New York City in the 1970s will feel a twinge of déjà vu in Newburgh—and be cognizant of the potential. Although Newburgh ranks as the state’s most crime-ridden city and a quarter of residents fall below the poverty line, the city’s spectacular architecture and intact urban fabric is luring a wave of newcomers. The Hudson Valley’s final frontier could well be on its way to becoming the next Brooklyn.

Handmade on Hudson: the Indie Craft Movement

Three years ago, Danielle Bliss and Joe Venditti were art school graduates struggling to find satisfying work when they started Wishbone Press. Working out of a loft in Kingston’s Shirt Factory, they design and print cards, coasters, business cards, wedding invitations and the like on four antique letterpresses. Their bold, eye-catching designs and messages keyed to the hip vernacular of the under-30 crowd updates an archaic printing technology with wit and whimsy.